Dr. Elizabeth Sampey is an explorer. She’s designed her life to be a balance between outdoor adventures and her professional life as a therapist and coach, teaching her clients how to balance mind, body, and spirit. She earned her doctorate in physical therapy in 2008. Not satisfied with the limitations of that modality, she kept pushing to find ways to heal holistically. Bikepackers will know her as the Arizona Trail Race 750 women’s record holder and Revel Bikes ambassador. While she’s relatively new to ultra bikepack racing, she's not new to human-powered adventure. She’s been pushing her limits with backcountry skiing, running, and mountain biking for her entire adult life. She’s done months-long multisport expeditions in places like Peru and Pakistan. She’s been able to apply all she’s learned in her adventuring and her path as a healer to her own life with a unique sense of curiosity and humility that we find inspiring. We sat down with Dr. Sampey recently to learn more about her approach.

Tell us a little about your background - as an athlete and a doctor. How does one aspect influence the other?

I’ve been an athlete since I was little -- I competed in my first running race when I was four years old. I’ve always enjoyed moving, especially fast and far. I grew up on a farm in Minnesota and was always out running around in the woods, cross-country skiing, horseback riding, and riding bikes with my parents and younger siblings.

I moved to Colorado when I was 17, immediately took a Level 1 Avalanche course and started learning to backcountry ski so I could move through the mountains in the winter. This has always been my favorite mode of travel because I can draw my own lines on maps and through the snow, unlimited by the need for trails or roads. This captured most of my attention for quite awhile, and in the summers I spent time exploring on the bike. It’s always been about exploring for me. I get bored doing the same things all the time. I want to discover and experience new (to me) places.

I started racing bikes in my mid 20s and have raced nearly all disciplines of both road and mountain biking over the last decade plus. In 2013 I started getting into multisport adventures, inspired by the question of how creative could I be in the ways I linked landscapes together. This started with exploring my then-backyard in Crested Butte, CO, and evolved into months-long international trips. I decided to try ultra bikepack racing about five years ago and it was a perfect blend of backcountry travel and competitive pursuit, which I really loved.

I started my doctoral education in 2005 after living in New Zealand for a year in a station wagon and just skiing a lot. I sort of applied to grad school on a whim, and am pretty shocked that I actually got in the first time. I didn’t think I would, but I did, and so I went. I graduated with my doctorate in physical therapy in 2008. Even though it wasn’t a well thought-out decision it made sense, as I’ve always been obsessed with the body and movement and optimizing my own body to perform well in the adventures I’ve wanted to do. I also spent a bunch of time in physical therapy as a young athlete because I was always getting injured, so maybe intuitively I figured it was time to be on the other side of the table.

I practiced in traditional healthcare for 6 years as I was also developing my athlete career, and started a small body-mind performance coaching and physical therapy virtual business on the side in 2013 when an injury sidelined me from the bike and I got bored. This was a smart move, as I decided to take my athlete work to the next level in 2015 and end my career in traditional physical therapy, and got to take my little business with me and wrap together all the work I loved.

Since then I’ve had a blended career of racing and expedition work, coaching and physical therapy in a virtual and hybrid format, public speaking, writing, and teaching workshops and clinics. Everything I do definitely influences everything else I do; I definitely wouldn’t be nearly as effective as a coach if I didn’t have all these experiences myself as an athlete and adventurer. And everything I know from my years of education, I definitely also apply to myself to be the best and most sustainable athlete I can be.

You seem to have an interesting blend of Eastern and Western approaches. Most doctors seem to choose one or the other. How do you balance the two?

Like everything else in my life, I just blend them together rather than balance them. I learned to work with the human energy field somewhere along the way, and formally trained in the Japanese Reiki modality in 2017. Eastern medicine does a much better job of looking at the whole person, physical, mental, emotional, energetic and spiritual, than Western medicine does. Having a background in both means I can use elements of all of it as I see fit, based on the person that’s sitting in front of me and their specific needs.

I saw early on as a physical therapist how only isolating the physical system does such a disservice to people, and I saw so many people have incomplete recoveries without pulling in the other equally important pieces. That’s a big reason I left traditional healthcare; there’s no time for all of it as the insurance system dictates we rush people through and pass them off to support staff to keep productivity high. There’s very little time for connection and humanity, which in my opinion is the only way to effectively teach someone how to heal their own bodies.

I consider myself an educator more than a doctor. Sure, I know a lot more than the average person about these things because of my education. But I see my job as teaching people how to listen to, talk to, and take care of their own bodies so that they can prevent getting injured in the first place, and help themselves fully heal when they do. I provide education and guidance, but each individual ultimately is the authority over their own body and self.

How do you use what you know as a therapist on the trail?

I know how to activate muscles and move in patterns that create optimal alignment, power, and efficiency. This makes a huge difference when I’m tired or it’s been a long time moving and the body tends to get sloppy. If I experience pain on the bike, or in anything else, I listen to that and ask myself where I might be slipping and how I could move differently. Usually, when I make those adjustments, the pain goes away.

In endurance sports even slight impairments in movement patterns can add up over time and cause pain and injury. If we just ignore it, we might get lucky and it’ll go away, or it could end up becoming a huge problem. The more we ignore our bodies the more trouble we’ll be in eventually. I try to avoid that for myself, and this is what I teach others to do as well.

You’re a multisport athlete, including skiing and packrafting. How do the other sports influence your bikepacking? Have you combined the packrafting and mountain biking?

Yes! Multisport adventures are my favorite and really what I plan my whole year around. I’ve been doing expedition-style bikerafting adventures around the world since 2017, and I’m actually a contributing author to a book called The Bikeraft Guide, so I guess I must know something about it! Ha. I also love combining packrafting and ski mountaineering, and bikepacking and skiing, and bikepacking and mountain running. Again, it’s simply a question of curiosity around how I can link landscapes and see new places, and become part of those landscapes for as long as I’m out there. I connect more with the natural world than the human world, and it’s so cool that we have all these great ways of exploring it.

What has been your favorite adventure so far? Favorite part of the world?

Wow, that’s a hard one. My most recent big international adventure was bike-rafting across Pakistan, India, and Nepal with one teammate in winter of 2019/2020. That was wild. Pakistan is a really incredible part of the world, the people are so kind, and the mountains and rivers are next-level huge. It was intimidating in a lot of ways and the most logistically complex expedition I’ve ever put together. It was an amazing experience.

Congrats on your AZTR Women’s record! I saw on your feed that you consulted with Kurt Refsnider, who has so much experience with the Arizona Trail Race. How much does research factor into your races/trips?

Thanks! That was a really fun bike ride. The Arizona Trail is hands down my favorite bike ride in the US. Yeah, I do a ton of research into both races and adventure trips. Especially for races, I find someone who knows the trail really well and chat with them about it. For the AZT it was Kurt, for the Colorado Trail I spent a lot of time talking with my friend Jefe Branham who has definitely spent more time on that trail than anyone. If I ever do the Tour Divide I’ll be calling up Jay Petervary, for that same reason.
It’s important to do your research if you want to go fast, but also if you want to be smart. It can be a long ways in between resupplies on those long-distance trails, and between water sources, and you don’t want to end up having to bail because you’ve run out of food or water, or have a bad time because you’re carrying way more of it than you need to and your bike is heavy. So I do a lot of research into estimating my splits so I can then estimate how many calories I need to buy at each resupply and how much water capacity I need to have.

For non-racing adventure trips it’s a ton of logistical work as well, probably more, because I’m usually creating my own routes or a teammate and I are doing it together. Especially for multisport this gets complicated, but it’s also my favorite part because it’s so creative. For international trips there’s also visas and learning about the culture and in places like Pakistan or Peru or Guatemala, talking to people on the ground as much as possible to learn the regions where you need to be more careful moving about as a foreigner.

Adding packrafting to my repertoire made it more interesting as I’ve had to learn how to scout rivers via satellite from halfway across the world. I’m not a great paddler so I need to have a good idea of how steep the rivers are, how big the whitewater is going to be, whether or not there are possibilities for portage, how to get off the river for resupplies. All of that. I’ve had a few great river mentors over the last handful of years so I’m learning quickly, but sometimes it’s scary!

Can you tell us about your preparations for your OTT ride. Had you ridden any parts of the Oregon Timber Trail before race day?

My OTT preparations were actually really challenging for me. I had a bad concussion in the fall of 2020 and got post-concussive syndrome. I’m still dealing with that actually. But it’s affected me cognitively, in ways that make it hard to do all this logistical preparation that I’m used to doing.

My boyfriend actually had to help me with it quite a bit, which was funny because he’s never done an ultra race. So I had to talk him through the process of how I do it, which I was able to do, but for some reason I wasn’t able to actually do it myself. My brain couldn’t make sense of the steps enough to actually execute it. It was the weirdest thing.
Same with preparing my bike -- I wanted to trade some parts from another bike, and I’ve been doing that for years, I build all my bikes myself, and for whatever reason couldn’t wrap my brain around how to swap my fork and handlebars and chainring. The steps, again, didn’t make sense in my head when it actually came time to execute. My brain couldn’t tell my body what to do. So he had to do all of that for me.

It was really frustrating actually, to not have the ability to do something I’d done so many times before. If it wasn’t for him, I couldn’t have started the race. He was really amazing in that way, he knew how much it meant to me to race an ultra again and so he gave up so much of his own time to help me make that happen.

And no, I’d never ridden any parts of the OTT! I’d run some of the Fremont tier, so I knew what the landscape was like, and like always I did a ton of research. But I was really going into it pretty blind, which I actually love, because it has that element of exploring that I always crave.

We know your OTT run got cut short by the Bootleg Fire. Can you tell us how that went for you? Were you “just riding” or planning on going fast?

Yeah, it was crazy! There were so many fires. The one that was threatening the Fremont section, (was that the Bootleg?) it came so close that the whole forest was shut down. Only the top five of us made it through that whole section before it closed, the rest of everyone had to bail to the highway and ride or get shuttled around to Chemult and then get back on the trail. I was in third at that point. I was chasing Nat and Ben real hard, I was within an hour or two of them, and I knew Max and Allen were also right on my tail as we’d been leapfrogging a bit. I wanted to keep racing and I knew the forest might close so I pushed pretty hard on those days.

It was super eerie being out on Winter Rim alone, the whole atmosphere was orange, and it was raining ash on me the whole time. It was hard to breathe and I thought about bailing, but from where I was it would have been about the same amount of time to go back as it was to go forward. So I just went forward. I was glad I did though because going up and over Mt. Yamsay was really special. It was so much fun!

I was really trying to play the timing with winds and the smoke blowing in/out, so I’d bed down early as the smoke would roll in, often right at dark, and then it would blow out in the early morning hours, so I’d get up around 2 or 3 and start going again. Usually I’d have pretty clear air until around noon and I’d push hard. Then I’d slow down as it got worse so I wasn’t breathing hard in it.

I always want to go fast, but I didn’t really have expectations going in because of the brain injury. I had no idea how my brain would respond to the long days on the bike and the sleep deprivation and I didn’t want to push the brain too hard. My plan was to ride long days and sleep full nights for the first few days, and see how that went. If it was okay I would start cutting sleep towards the middle or end of the race.

Unfortunately that didn’t happen as the mosquitos were so bad that I didn’t really get any sleep at all, even with a headnet, and my brain started to do some weird things. That happens normally in ultras with sleep deprivation, but I hadn’t intended to put my still-healing brain through that so early. So when the smoke was so bad, and to give my brain a break, I got a hotel in Chemult to get a good night’s sleep away from the smoke and bugs. I ate two footlong Subway sandwiches and five cookies and slept a full 12 hours. The next morning I called every place in Chemult and Oakridge trying to buy any type of mosquito netting so I could keep racing because I knew I needed to sleep if I was going to ride fast. But I couldn’t find anything, so I just went into tour mode through to Oakridge. That section was amazing. I loved the lush landscape, squishy soil and rooty terrain. I found Allen in Chemult and we rode out together and it was a lot of fun.

I also found some other riders who had gotten shuttled around after the Fremont closure and had ended up ahead of those of us who had made it through, so they were in tour mode, and I got to chat with them and I also did lots of skinny dipping! I lost count of the times I went swimming. It was great. Then there was more fire on the trail up ahead, I think near Sisters, so between that and my brain really struggling and no mosquito net I decided to call it in Oakridge.

Do you have plans to return to ride the OTT?

I’d love to, I really do want to see the whole thing, and I’d also love to try for an FKT on the full course. But honestly, and unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen in fire season. So, I need to figure out when the best time of year would be to go back and do that. I’d been trying to ITT the OTT for two years prior to the grand depart, and each time the fires made me unable to even start. It’s unfortunate, but I think this is our new reality in the American West. I was just chatting with Lael about this a few days ago, she had a similar experience with her Divide ITT this year, and it’s sad for us wanting to do these long-distance trails but it’s even more sad for the people who live here. I don’t know the solution, but as for the OTT, I think it’s going to have to be a spring or late fall effort for me.


We know the OTT is pretty raw…minimal signage (if any) Is that part of the charm or would you like to see it more developed? What would you like to see improved?

I loved it! I didn’t even see any signage at all, probably because I wasn’t looking. There’s a reason I have a GPS stuck to my stem cap. It’s easy enough (usually) to just follow the line, and also to just use my eyeballs. There were some places on Winter Rim after it got dark and it was all smoky where I lost the trail a few times, and in a couple other places too, but I always found it again after not too long. It’s part of the fun, you have to stay alert out there. I guess for people wanting to ride sections who don’t always want to rely on a GPX track it could be nice to have more signage, but I feel like that’s part of the charm of riding a backcountry trail. I like feeling like I’m way out there.

Can you tell us the highlights about your OTT setup…bike, sleep system, food, clothing

Honestly, I don’t remember a lot about my setup. My brain was pretty messed up around that time, I’m surprised I even made it to the start line. One thing I would definitely do differently is bring some sort of mesh bug protection for sleeping. My headnet was not enough, the mosquitos chewed me right through it. I usually only use an ultralight bivy, and sometimes I carry a tiny tarp if I know it’s going to be wet, but neither of those things helped with the onslaught of mosquitos all night long. The mosquitos don’t go to sleep in Oregon, apparently. I do think my choice of a full-suspension bike was right on, obviously you can ride any trail on any bike, but I definitely had a great time on my Revel Ranger. For food, I always eat real food… I started the race with an entire pizza in my frame bag, a whole bag of precooked chicken nuggets (probably 80 of them), sweet potato fries, breakfast burritos, cookies. It’s a long carry from the start to Chemult so I think I had about 14,000 calories and I needed every last one of them. For clothing, it was super warm even at night, so I didn’t even use the extra wool layer I brought. I was sweating in my 35 degree bag every night. That could have been different in the northern regions but that was my experience

#Vanlife: overrated or underrated? We all dream of the freedom of a nomadic life. Can you share the pros and cons, maybe a best day in the van and a worst day in the van. Do you live full time in your van or take breaks and stay with friends or rent an apartment for a season?

I’ve loved it! I lived in my van full-time for 6 years, and I basically just followed the good weather (or the storms if I want to ski) through the western US and Canada. Now, I’m in a relationship with someone who’s gone back to school for a masters’ degree, so he’s renting a house in Logan UT and I’m part-time there with him, part-time in my van. I’m not sure what the future will hold but I do think I’ll always enjoy being in the van at least part-time. I love the freedom to go and explore new places for as long as I want without having to “go home.”
Best day in the van is when I wake up with the sun, take my dog for a walk, do some yoga, and then some coaching work on my computer for a few hours or share some fun stories on social media before heading out for a ride or run. I love being out into the sunset and even after dark, the world is so magical at night. Then back to the van for dinner and sleeping. Honestly, those were most of the days over the past 6 years, it really has been a great way to live for me. Worst day in the van is when my huge fluffy dog gets sprayed by a skunk. That makes for a terrible few weeks. It’s happened twice and it’s enough to make me want to get him his own van so I don’t have to live with it, ha!

The OTT board has been working on Diversity Equity and Inclusion. How can we make the Oregon Timber Trail more diverse, equitable and inclusive. DId you feel welcome? What would make it more so?

I think you all did a great job of being really inviting to folks who aren’t in the majority of those who do bike races. It was so much fun for me especially when I went into touring mode and started to come up on people who had been shuttled around the fire closure, to take the time to chat with everyone and hear their stories. For a sport usually full of white dudes and a few women, it was really cool to see how the OTT pulled others in and we were all just a bunch of kooks out there riding bikes and having fun both together and alone.

One thing that did surprise me a bit was having all those segments stand alone with their own FKTs, which sounds complicated, but only having those FKTs being overalls and not recognizing female FKTs. Personally, when I’m out there racing I’m racing everyone, regardless of their gender. But I have talked to some other women since the race and when I mentioned that aspect, they did say that it would dissuade them from doing the OTT knowing that they had to compete with the top men for an FKT.

There are certainly a few women out there who are doing that, sometimes I’m one of those and sometimes I’m not, but that’s definitely not the majority of women who actually have day jobs and don’t ride their bikes full-time, they’re not going to be up there competing with the fastest men. But they still enjoy the opportunity to compete for a female FKT. When this was brought up on social media the OTT staff said it was because of the emphasis on DEI and how it would be too hard to make categories based on gender anymore, which I completely understand. But, maybe it would work to have men’s, women’s, and non-binary FKTs. That’s only adding one more category from the usual.I haven’t sorted out how I personally feel about this but I was surprised by it, and that’s the feedback I got from a handful of women who race ultras and are inspired by competing for female FKTs, who said they would steer away from events where that wouldn’t be an option. They feel as though that goes against the idea of trying to bring more women into racing. Certainly, not everyone who does these events is chasing FKTs or race wins, but I think a good number at least have it in the back of their minds.